


To the Hills We Raise Our Eyes

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Brief Depiction of Violence Against Animals, Brother/Sister Incest, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gore, Incest, Prequel, References to Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 02:26:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Lucille Sharpe knows there is no such as ghosts. Unfortunately it seems her mother disagrees.





	To the Hills We Raise Our Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Terrantalen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Terrantalen/gifts).



Lucille Sharpe knew that there was no such thing as ghosts. Which meant that this spectre of the late Lady Beatrice Sharpe, waiting in the bathtub with her skull cleaved in two, could be nothing more than a hallucination, further proof of Lucille’s madness. As if anyone were foolish enough to need such a thing.

“Undress, please,” the attendant said sharply and Lucille started. She’d almost forgotten there was anyone else there at all. _Can’t you see her?_ she wanted to ask, but Thomas whispered in her ear and she caught herself: it was quite clear the attendant could not see the murdered woman in the bathtub. And indeed, why should she?

Beatrice Sharpe was not there.

Her mother was staining the water red with her blood, her gnarled arthritic fingers clinging to the sides of the tub. Lucille could see white splinters of bone in the gore, blood streaming down from the gash, running into her eyes and down over her sagging breasts. The muscles in her jaw clenched as she ground her teeth, a familiar signal of old that Lucille recognised as a sign of rising fury, the promise of a reckoning to come for her wayward daughter. Bubbles of blood and spittle popped at the corners of her mouth,

 _She isn’t really there,_ Thomas murmured in her ear, his voice high and fluting.

Nor was Thomas. Not really. Her brother was no more real than her mother, and _he_ certainly wasn’t a ghost, but Lucille clung to his memory anyway, to the formal kiss he’d placed on her cheek and to the moment he gripped her arm and whispered in her ear: _Do as they tell you. Bide your time. I will come back for you, I swear it._

Well. What had Lucille ever done but submit?

She dropped her gaze and removed her undergarments, watched by both the attendant and her murdered mother. As her undershirt slithered to the ground, revealing the ruin of her back, she heard a faint intake of breath from the attendant. She kept her gaze on the shining white tiles, turned her head so she could not see the bath in her peripheral vision, and told herself there was nothing there, that when she turned her head the bath would be empty of everything but clear, clean water, and her mother would be gone.

Beatrice, of course, was not quite so accommodating. She was still there when Lucille looked back, like Banquo at the feast.

_Not so easy to get rid of me, is it, my dear?_

And then she tried to rise. Her hands grasped at the edge of the tub as she struggled in the bloody water, thrashing to get up. Lucille’s breath became ragged. She started to back away until the sour-faced attendant caught her arm. “Hurry it along,” she snapped. “We don’t have all evening.”

Lucille turned a pleading look on her. _Don’t make me_ , she begged with her eyes, but then she felt Thomas’s breath on her cheek, his lips close to her skin, never quite touching. _I will come back for you._

There would be no help from this woman, just as there had never been any help from the servants or her parents’ friends, or _anyone_ , other than themselves. She schooled her expression so that her face was as cold and smooth and impassive as marble, and saw an instant too late the glimmer of sympathy in the attendant’s face snuff out.

It didn’t matter. All she needed was her brother and he would come back for her. He promised.

To hide her fear, she took a step towards the bathtub, and then another, and her mother ceased her thrashing and went still, letting out a long rattling breath of triumph. Lucille smelled the reek of wet earth and rot, and she fixed her gaze on the moths dancing about the light fitting, the blood rushing in her ears as she stepped into the bath as far from her mother as it was possible to get.

As she lowered her foot into the water, it brushed against her mother’s ankle, and she shuddered, jerking her foot away towards the middle of the bath. She clung to the side of the bath, frozen, and it took a sharp word from the attendant to spur her on. Her other foot followed, and all she could see was her mother’s death’s head grin, the eyes blank with hatred, and those hands, those hands that had so often wielded a whip or a switch, those hands that struck and slapped and pinched, clenching and unclenching spasmodically on the side of the bath.

She could smell the iron-reek of blood, her mother’s perfume beneath the institutional stench of sweat and urine and carbolic soap. Beatrice Sharpe was not there. Beatrice Sharpe was dead. Lucille had buried a cleaver in her skull and put an end to her brutality almost a year ago to the day.

Her heart seemed to stop, held in suspension as she lowered herself to her knees, watching the dead woman warily. The water was shallow but warm, and she knelt, imprisoned by the walls of the tub and  her mother’s legs.

“There,” the attendant said with an attempt at cheerfulness. Lucille could feel the woman’s gaze running over her back in sympathy and pity, and an emotion came rising up in her like a tide, not embarrassment or shame, but a heartless black fury so powerful it was overwhelming, obliterating everything in its wake. With it, she saw something else, a flicker of uncertainty in her mother’s eyes. Something that looked very much like fear. “That’s not so bad now, is it?”

Lucille smiled, lips stretching back to bare her teeth. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not so bad at all.”

And she leant forward, stretching skin to skin over her mother’s naked body, bringing her mouth to her mother’s ear. Her hand curled around the back of her mother’s skull, sticky with blood. “He’s going to come back for me,” she breathed. “Wait and see.”

 _A promise made by a feckless selfish boy?_ Her mother’s voice sounded like the flutter of moth wings. _You’ll find out the hard way, daughter, exactly what that promise is worth._

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “You’re wrong you’re wrong you’re _wrong_.”

When she opened her eyes, her mother had gone. The water was clear. The attendant bid her rise, looking a little wary, and she obeyed, stood numb and silent as the attendant scrubbed her skin with carbolic soap and a rough cloth until it stung. Her mother had gone, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not summon Thomas either, not his spirit nor his memory.

They’d left her, both of them, and she was alone.

****

* * *

****

Thomas never visited her at Marlwood Hospital. It had been judged wiser to keep them apart, and as far as Lucille was concerned a crueller punishment could not have been devised. He wrote to her on occasion, his sporadic but keenly anticipated letters mostly consisting of complaints about his school, the tedium of lessons, the terrible food, the cruel schoolmasters and the awful boys. She read them and treasured them, and wondered how many of his petty trivial complaints had been manufactured for her benefit. Wondered whether he was relieved that he was there and she was here, locked away. He’d always felt aggrieved that he’d never been sent to school.

Perhaps it was for the best.

It was not so very terrible, Marlwood Hospital, not the nightmarish place of despair and torture she had imagined and feared it to be. It was a modern building of sturdy Victorian brick, especially designed and built for the purpose of healing fractured minds like hers. The doctors and attendants were mostly kind, or at worst indifferent, and the patients a mixed bunch, some cheerful and filled with hope, others heartbreakingly sad. Lucille judged very few to be dangerous. Mostly they were to be pitied.

The countryside in which the hospital stood was pleasantly bucolic, nothing at all like the bleak ruined wasteland of her childhood, and there were many opportunities to enjoy it. She had her own little patch of garden, and she was encouraged to read, and pursue her hobbies. She could sew and embroider and play the pianoforte for the pleasure of the other residents. One of the doctors shared her fascination with moths and butterflies and encouraged her interest, thinking it educational and improving.

Occasional phantoms aside, it was a far more pleasant home than the one she left behind. Were it not for Thomas, it might almost be a relief to surrender herself, to give herself over, heart and body and mind and soul, into the care of the doctors.

But she could never forget him.

Her loneliness was like a tightening knot of pain in her chest, a soreness in her throat that she could not swallow down, sapping away her appetite. There were nights when she cried herself to sleep, and imagined Thomas doing the same, all those many miles away. When another patient attempted to escape, plunging into the river and swimming for freedom, she imagined doing the same, fleeing this place of Victorian brick as though its tiled halls really did conceal the monsters that she feared and escaping across England in search of her brother, meaning to find his school and rescue him from his brutal schoolmasters.

Assuming he’d even agree to go with her, something of which Lucille was by no means certain.

Her mother’s parting words kept returning to her. They were lies, of course, but all the best lies held a kernel of truth. Feckless and selfish, she’d called him, and as much as Lucille adored her brother, she could not deny there was some truth to that. He _could_ be selfish, certainly, but she was his older sister; it was her duty to protect him, to shield him from all harm.

And mostly she had, but not always.

She’d been jealous of him when he was very young. All her earliest memories were of Thomas, hazy half-forgotten visions emerging from the fog of early childhood. Strange, the moments that people remembered when so much else had been forgotten and lost to time.

He was late to walk, her brother, and ever quick to cry, clinging to the skirts of their nanny. Frightened of almost everything, but so beautiful, and Lucille was jealous of that beauty, jealous of how their nanny made a fuss of him. She’d dream of taking up a pillow and pressing it down over his too-pretty face, and once, after one of their mother’s rare visits to the nursery, Lucille had pinched him in a fit of rage, digging her nails into the meat of his arm. He turned a look on her, his eyes wide and brimming with tears, and his shock at her betrayal was so palpable that Lucille was filled with remorse and guilt and she gathered him up and crushed his little face hard against her chest until he wriggled and squirmed to be let go.

On the nights when their father’s rage and their mother’s screams filled the house, he’d come crawling into her bed, seeking the warmth and love and comfort that only Lucille could give. Their nanny was long gone by then, seeking a less distressing position. That had been Lucille’s first lesson in how the ones you love will always betray you. There would be plenty more.

****

* * *

****

Three years later, it was Thomas’s ghost who showed her what it was like to be with a man.

A storm had swept in, lashing the hospital with torrential rain and rattling at the window panes like a demon seeking access. One of the women was confused and weeping in terror, convinced her husband – a brute of a man by all accounts – was coming to kill her. She cried out at every thunder crack and Lucille closed her eyes and burrowed down deeper into the bedclothes, cocooning herself tightly in the blankets. There she dreamed of being hunted.

This memory was from six months before Lucille killed her mother, and she could not even remember what it was they had done, only that they were hiding from their mother in a wardrobe, the air hot and dense with the reek of mothballs and must. She could remember thinking that this was how a fox must feel when the hounds had chased it to its den, and that had made her think of Thomas on his first hunt, his pallid face all the whiter with fresh blood streaked across his cheeks.

Their mother’s cane _thunked_ on the floorboards outside the wardrobe and Thomas’s arms tightened around her. He buried his face in her throat, and shook as the floorboards creaked, and she knew their mother must be standing directly outside.

Lucille felt the absurd urge to laugh bubbling up inside her. They always came at the worst times, these fits of madness. They made her want to spit and scream and rage, to hook her nails into talons and rip and tear. Thomas sensed the shift in her mood and held her tight, his hand clamped over her mouth.

All around them the clothes rustled; his breath rasped in his throat and the blood in her ears pulsed, and she couldn’t see how anyone could fail to hear them, couldn’t understand how her mother could be so _stupid_ not to know exactly where they were hiding. She held herself motionless, hardly daring to breathe, knowing that at any moment her mother would rip open the wardrobe doors and haul her out, and growing angrier and angrier with every second that passed and it failed to happen.

 _Thunk_. The cane, a little further away. She held her breath, blackness pulsing at the edge of her vision. Thomas had stopped breathing too. The door opened and closed, and still she could not risk taking a breath. Thomas’s hand was hot and damp with sweat, and with her lips parted, she could taste the salt of his sweat on her tongue.

 _I think she’s gone,_ Lucille wanted to say, but surely to speak would be to summon up her mother like a vengeful spirit. She might be lying in wait for them to reveal themselves.

Lucille wouldn’t put it past her; her mother could be sly.

Finally she risked breathing and leant back against Thomas. He tensed, seeming almost more frightened than when they were being hunted. His hand rested at the high neckline of her gown, fingertips brushing against her throat. His cheek pressed against hers, and when she turned her head, his breath scorched a trail along her cheek to the corner of her lips. He was so close she could feel the butterfly-flicker of his eyelashes against her cheekbone.

She felt strangely light-headed, aware of her body in a way that she’d never been before, aware of the tight pinch of her corset and his touch. The hand on her throat slid slowly down, until it reached the place where the upper slope of her breasts began, and there it stopped. A strange aching sensation grew in her stomach and she pressed a little harder back against him, feigning faintness – as if her Thomas would be such a fool as to fall for that. He grunted deep in his throat, then without warning he shoved her away and barged past her, stumbling out into the bedroom like a drunkard.

Dangerous things, memories.

Now, with the rain’s rhythmic drumming on the windowpane, it was as if she’d summoned him; she heard the pad of bare feet on the floorboards and the mattress rocked with the weight of a knee set upon it. Her name was murmured questioningly and she uncurled in silent acquiescence.

And whomever those feet might have belonged to when they walked across the room, it was Thomas who slipped into the bed beside her, bringing with him a draught of cool air.

With her eyes closed, it wasn’t so different from home: the smell of damp and the sound of the rain, the narrow bed and the two of them clinging to one other.

He hadn’t kissed her in the memory, but now he did, kissing her with a hard uncompromising passion and pushing her legs apart. He cupped her mound for a moment, before probing at her entrance with no words, only a breath sucked through teeth. They worked at her, those fingers, slow and teasing, easing inside her, then slipping out to palpitate at the edges, until she could hear the wet slick sounds they made and feel a deep ache inside her, an urgent clutching need to be filled. She arched her hips up towards him, and he was moving down the bed, rough hands gripping her knees, and if the caress of his fingers was pleasurable, the caress of his tongue was sublime. He drank from her as if she was a chalice, pulling her up towards him, his tongue flicking at the front of her cleft, first slow and leisurely, then fast and frantic. She gave a soft moan, and he reached up to cover her mouth with his calloused palm, a reminder to stay silent.

She twisted her face away, fingers tightening on the sheets, her nightgown rucked up around her waist. The hand dropped to her breast instead, pinching at her nipple through the cotton, bringing to a sharp point. She wrapped her thighs around his head and arched her hips off the bed. His tongue slapped against her flesh, dragging a moan out of her, and she heard movement, something stirring across the room.

With her eyes tight clamped shut, the rustling murmur was transformed into the image of her mother, wet feet slapping on the floor, staggering like a puppet with its strings cut, and Lucille was coming, clawing at Thomas’s shoulders, nails digging into his skin through his nightshirt. He slammed his hand over her mouth again to silence her, and she bit down, burying her teeth in the meat of his palm as she gasped out her ecstasy into his hot sweating hand.

There was a punishment of course – wasn’t there always? – but it was worth every snatched stolen moment of pleasure. She wondered if Thomas felt it too, if she ever visited him the way he visited her. And if she did, whether he ever saw their mother too.

****

* * *

****

Promise or not, nine years passed before he finally sent for her. He was twenty-one by then, a young man in his prime, and she was twenty-three, although she felt far older. It had been so long she’d almost given up hope, losing herself in the rhythm of the days at Marlwood. It was the sort of house that could have swallowed her up.

When she returned to Allerdale Hall it was early spring, the sky the colour of a bruise above the bleak hills that surrounded the house. All the life had been sucked out of the land, the only colour the rutted roads of reddish earth, and when she saw the house, it seemed a hand had reached out from her past and closed around her throat.

Allerdale Hall stood starkly silhouetted against the sky, what remained of its staff awaiting her arrival outside. Only a handful of servants, nothing like the small army she remembered from her childhood. A grim-faced woman who had to be the housekeeper stood flanked by painfully young-looking maids, all eyeing the approaching carriage as though it contained the devil himself. Only Finlay, who handed her down from the carriage, was both a familiar face and the only one to regard her with sympathy and genuine welcome. They were, she realised, all afraid of her.

Thomas wasn’t there.

Business in London, the housekeeper explained, as she bustled about, careful to keep Lucille in view at all times.

The house was a ruin.

It never had been in the best of states; there was always something that needed doing, something that needed to be repaired or updated. Like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s _Alice through the Looking Glass_ , constantly running in order to stay still, it was a never-ending race to keep it from crumbling into decay.

Thomas had often written to her about it, his complaints about school shifting to complaints about the estate and its dwindling yearly return, which was nowhere near sufficient to keep a house of this size in a reasonable state of repair.

The roof leaked, rats and every other kind of vermin scuttled everywhere she looked, and damp crept up from the cellar and down from the attic to meet in the middle. Jagged cracks were developing in the walls, some so wide she could push her entire hand into the gap. The ancient boiler creaked and groaned so violently she thought it might tear itself away from the wall, and her own heart shook in sympathy.

Everything was falling apart.

Still... nothing new about that.

There’d always been damp, always been rats. As a child, she’d once been woken by the sound of Thomas shrieking, and had rolled out of bed to see a rat perched on the edge of his crib. She’d moved without thinking, snatched it up and dashed its brains out against the wall, while Thomas stared up at her in horror, the twin sparks of light from the dying embers of the fire catching in his eyes. She dropped the rat and kicked it away, but had returned to it later when Thomas was napping, fascinated by its soft fur, the ruin of its skull, the tail trailing between her fingers, that lifeless little body cupped in her hands with its tiny human hands clenched in helpless fury.

It wasn’t the last rat she’d have to kill.

Rats spread disease and contaminated food. They gnawed at the fabric of a house, chewed through water- and gas-pipes and undermined foundations. She was protecting Allerdale Hall. She was protecting Thomas.

At Marlwood, she used to lie awake lulled by the sound of the rain, fancying she could hear melodies concealed in its soft rhythm. It was one of the few things that could bring her peace, but here all she could think about was the damage water caused to the fabric of a house. It warped the beams, and encouraged damp and mould to creep across the walls, until the chinoiserie wallpaper could be ripped off in great tattered strips and beneath the crumbling plaster was damp to the touch and black with rot.

With every month that passed, the house crumbled a little more. With every month that passed, she learned a little more of the art of penny-pinching and parsimony.

And there were times when it seemed like the rain would never stop.

****

* * *

****

Thomas might not have been waiting for her at Allerdale Hall, but her mother was. Her mother and her father both, their ghosts haunting every room, every staircase, every shadowed corner. When she saw her pale drawn face in the looking glass, for a moment in the dim guttering light it was her mother’s face she saw. The ill-trained maids clattered up and down the staircase, run ragged with too many jobs for too few servants, and each step was her mother’s cane, each slamming door a harbinger of her father’s oncoming rage. There were echoes of memory everywhere she looked: in the nursery where everything was silent and shrouded with a thick layer of dust, in the stables where the lingering smell of horses had sunk deep into the walls.

In one of Thomas’s more hopeful letters he’d written of buying her a horse, but she knew this would never happen. She’d seen the ledgers, studied the accounts. Thomas never had possessed a head for figures. Unless matters changed drastically, they simply could not afford it. So there would be no horse for her. Not unless the foundations of Thomas’s castles in the air proved more substantial than those of Allerdale Hall.

A long time passed before she could bring herself to bathe in the bathroom where her mother had died. What she expected to find there she wasn’t certain, but she sat perched on the side of the tub in a silk kimono, letting the blood-red water play through her fingers, aware of her mother watching.

She’d expected the bathroom to be bad, but it took her much longer to summon up the courage to go into the parlour. It was kept in better shape than much of the rest of the house, but there was still a layer of dust over much of the furniture, and a sense of general disuse. The smell of mildew lingered in the air, and beneath that a deeper earthier smell, mineral-rich with an underlying metallic tang like blood which she knew was the clay, seeping up from deep underground.

Her mother’s portrait stared down at Lucille in accusation. It was worse, somehow, than the living corpse that haunted her from time to time, because at least in the ghost’s eyes there had glimmered a new light of respect, the acknowledgement that Lucille might not simply be a thing to be crumpled underfoot.

In the interests of frugality, she’d taken to wearing her mother’s clothes. She had to alter them to fit and they were all ridiculously old-fashioned and decades out of date, but since there was no one to see her but the servants she didn’t suppose it mattered. Today she wore a high-necked dress of black silk taffeta, shot through with shimmering colours like a raven’s wing. Strangely, it suited her, even if it horrified her how in a certain light she resembled her mother; they shared the same bone structure, the same forbidding look around the eyes. Now, beneath her mother’s disdainful gaze, she felt as if she were playing dress-up and would be whipped if she was caught playing in her mother’s things.

She felt unreal: a ghost with its tethers cut loose to wander the aether, without Thomas to keep her grounded, without Thomas to protect. It should have been the two of them.

They’d always ruled this house when their parents were away. There was a governess, of course, but she was a pallid young woman with mousy hair who read entirely too many novels, and Lucille knew exactly which were the tender spots to press. Since the governess was more afraid of Lucille’s parents than Lucille was herself, she was easy to manipulate.

They’d roam the countryside, Thomas and Lucille, wild with temporary freedom, or seclude themselves in the stables, or play at Mother and Father in the house.

He’d brush out her hair, each stroke slow and careful and considered, and the bristles would raise shivers on her skin as he drew them along her scalp, leaning close so she could see him in the foxed mirror, a pallid ghost of a face beside her own. They were so alike, they could be twins, and he coiled his fingers into her hair, wrapping it around his fingers, toying with it in fascination.

They wandered the rooms that were shuttered and left fallow while their parents were away. They learned the corridors, the winding passages, every secret nook and cranny, the cupboards which she told Thomas were priest holes, although of course they were no such thing, and he would have known that if he’d paid the slightest bit of attention to family history. Lucille learned in his stead.

The house’s foundations and bricks become her tendons and bones, the damp and the water coursing through the pipes her blood. She’d lean against the damp walls and listen to the rattle and growl of the pipes and imagine herself as a thing fashioned from brick and wood and plaster.

One day Allerdale Hall would, God willing, pass to Thomas. It would be his. And so would Lucille. She had nowhere else to go.

****

* * *

****

When Thomas returned, he came creeping back, as if hoping he’d return to find her gone. There was no warning, no letter to herald his coming, only the sound of voices in the hallway, the sense that something had shifted in the fabric of the house.

The sight of him stopped her breath. The last time she’d seen him, he was a terrified boy, his face white with fear, his eyes reddened with the tears he was holding back. That was the Thomas she’d been holding in her heart all this time, and it was hard to reconcile that boy with this young man, slender and elegant in impeccable tailoring. The boyish plumpness in his face had been scoured away, replaced by narrow features that ought by rights to have belonged to a marble statue, and his eyes were sorrowful beneath starkly expressive brows.

For an instant when he glanced up to see her descending the stairs, his face froze in a stricken expression and a cold fist closed around her heart. He’d sent for her, certainly, but perhaps he’d never truly expected her to come, and she faltered, a bolt of fear piercing her apathy, leaving her red-raw as an open wound.

Something in that stricken expression made her feel as if she were a ghost.

“My God,” he said. “ _Lucille_.”

“Welcome home, Thomas.” She began to descend once more, her hand on the bannister to steady herself. His gaze flitted over her dress, then, as if he’d only just remembered they weren’t alone, he nodded to the housekeeper, dismissing her. Uncertainty flickered in the older woman’s eyes before she inclined her head and withdrew, and Lucille wondered if she’d been warned against leaving the two of them alone together, and if so by whom.

“I ought to have been the one welcoming you.” He kissed her cheek, his lips cool and chaste. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.” She pulled back and found his eyes searching her face, examining her features, making her feel like an insect pinned out for his perusal. And not that she would have minded, but… “Is something the matter?”

“You haven’t changed,” he murmured, disquiet in his eyes. “Not the slightest bit.” The moment stretched out, then he seemed to shake himself and put, Lucille noted, some distance between the two of them. “If only the same could be said of the house.” With a taut self-deprecating smile that did not touch his eyes, he gestured at the cavernous hall. “Allerdale Hall has stood for centuries, yet less than a decade in my care and it’s already a ruin.”

“It’s hardly a ruin.”

He shook his head gloomily as if he hadn’t heard her. “No sooner is one problem fixed, then something else springs up. I honestly wonder how Father managed.”

The answer to that, of course, was that he hadn’t managed, and had only ever been storing up debts and difficulties for the next generation, but she doubted pointing that out would help. Thomas’s manner towards her seemed so stiff and formal it was as if they were strangers to one another.

Well, why not? What was Lucille to him if not another responsibility, his lunatic sister, a further drain on the family capital? Marlwood Hospital must have been expensive.

Was that the sole reason he brought her home? Did he mean to have her locked up here instead, his madwoman in the attic? His first Mrs Rochester?

A stirring in the air, the whisper of silk skirts, her mother’s mocking ghost.

 _You’re wrong you’re wrong you’re wrong,_ she thought, even as Thomas disengaged from her. There was a finality and decisiveness about his movements that made her think that if she resisted, he might resort to violence to shove her away.

Loneliness clawed its way inside her heart. The dream she’d clung to in the long years of what she’d come to think of as her imprisonment now seemed tattered and shabby. She’d never had much time for the fairy tales their nurse used to tell then, but now it felt as if Thomas, her beautiful, precious brother, had been stolen from her and enchanted, and if that were true, surely there had to be a way to win him back.

****

* * *

****

Over the days that followed Thomas was as careful around her as if she were a china doll that might shatter at the slightest blow. It was only when he spoke of the mines and his plans for the development of new machinery did he become animated, his eyes brightening as he talked of the deposits of clay he believed still lay beneath their feet, unreachable using traditional methods. They were at dinner, and he was, she thought, a little drunk, his eyes shining not with the pleasure of her company, no matter how much she might wish that were so, but with too much wine.

She retired to bed, and found she could not sleep. A low moaning shivered through the house. It dipped and rose, accompanied by the creaks and groans of the wooden joints, the house’s arthritic bones. Water dripped through the gaps in the window frame, spilling over the cracked, peeling paint on the window sill, and streaming down the wall to pool on the floor.

It was the sort of night that would have drawn him into her bed for comfort once upon a time, but it seemed he was finding comfort elsewhere these days. But Lucille was restless, she was weary, and she rose out of bed, tugging her mother’s silk dressing gown over her nightgown – also her mother’s – and ventured out into the hall and down the staircase, to the parlour where no ghosts were waiting.

Beneath her mother’s stern and disapproving gaze, she ran her fingers over the piano keys and picked out a melody, something slow and sad and sweet, a lullaby she used to sing for Thomas.

Gradually she became aware she was not alone. Thomas was watching her from the doorway, dishevelled in the same clothes he’d been wearing at dinner, the black silk waistcoat, his cravat untied and hanging loose about his neck.

“It’s a filthy night.” Not just dishevelled, but a little drunk too, words slurred with wine and weariness. His exhaustion was etched deep around his eyes.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, not pausing in the music.

“I’m afraid I don’t sleep much at all these days, not when I’m in this house.” He leaned on the piano and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I cannot stay here, Lucille.”

She stopped playing. “This is your home.”

“When has this _ever_ been a home? It’s never been anything of the kind. It...” He stopped and shook his head, struggling to find the words. Then he seemed to realise the music had ceased. “You’ve stopped playing.”

“I thought I’d disturbed you.”

“Perhaps you did, but why on earth would that mean I wanted you to stop?” His voice softened. “Keep playing. Please.”

She did, softer, sweeter. Wishing the song didn’t sound quite so heartbreakingly sad. What sort of monster would sing this to a child? “It could be a home. We could make it so. Allerdale Hall is ours now. It’s not as if there’s any such thing as ghosts.”

“Have you tried telling Mother that? Because I’m not sure she’d listen.” When she glanced up at him, his eyes were fixed on the portrait. “But you’re right, of course. If we can make the mines a success once more, restore the Sharpe fortune…” He pointed at the painting. “First things first, though, I’m going to burn that hideous thing.”

“You will do no such thing,” she said, laughing. He turned a rueful grin on her. “Prove her wrong, Thomas. Her and Father. Besides, that hideous thing might be one of the last items of value in the house. You’ll regret burning it if we need to pawn it.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“No,” she agreed, although she’d seen the ledgers and she suspected it was very likely that it would in fact come to that. She patted the seat beside her, and he sat facing outwards, legs sprawled and his upper arm pressing against hers. He smelled of wet heather and brandy, machine oil and clay. A rich peaty smell that made her think instantly of her father, the gun-smoke forever clinging to his rain-dampened tweeds. She missed a note, the rhythm of the lullaby upset, as Thomas leaned closer.

“Lucille? You’re shaking.” He placed his hand against her cheek and turned her face towards his, and she thought of the two of them, side by side, so alike they might be each other’s twinned reflection, two sides of the same coin. She was almost breathless as he studied her, searching for what she could likely never know, and she asked the question before she could stop herself, before she even knew she was going to ask it.

“Did you ever dream about me while I was away?”

He frowned. “I suppose I must have done.” Which seemed a remarkably evasive answer.

His gaze shifted back to the portrait, and Lucille felt the shivery sense of being watched, not by inanimate layers of paint on canvas, but by her mother’s presence. Beatrice Sharpe was there: Lucille was certain of it. She could smell her mother’s lily of the valley perfume, could feel the bite of fingers on her skin.

The dressing gown had come loose. In the gloom his eyes looked black. She reached up behind her back and tugged the ribbon binding her plait loose, then took his hand and lifted it to her hair.

Then she began to play, each note slow as treacle, as he ran his fingers through her hair, combing out the plait until her hair was a shining sheet of silk.

It was an enchantment, she thought later, but who the enchanter and who the enchanted was, she could not have said, only that she seemed caught up in a river of want and need and she could not have fought it even if she wanted to.

He moved to stand behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders, and at the weight of them she dropped her head back against his stomach and felt the urgent eager press of his manhood.

She turned and tugged at the fastenings of his trousers. He flinched at her touch, his hands closing on her shoulders as if he meant to push her away. He didn’t.

The skin of his stomach was very pale, with a trail of dark hair that led down past the waistband of his drawers. He was a creature of contrasts, her Thomas, his pale skin  and the pristine starched white of his shirt against the dark of his hair, his suit and waistcoat. She’d never seen anything so beautiful, and she reached for the tie fastenings at the waist of his undergarments. Beneath the cotton, the outline of his shaft seemed to twitch and move like a living thing, and she realised she could smell its dark musky scent, and her movements grew more urgent.

She cried out in frustration when he stopped her, his hands tightening on his shoulder. He seemed about to say something, the look he gave her yearning and hungry, eagerness mingling with shame and embarrassment and apology. Then his gaze flicked up towards the portrait.

“I feel as though she’s watching us,” he said, softly, as if their mother might actually be eavesdropping.

“ _Good_. Perhaps she’ll learn something.”

He gave a startled laugh.

And then she jerked down his drawers and his shaft sprang free, and it seemed to be reaching for her out of the dark hair crinkled at its base, half-hidden by the bunched up cotton of his underwear. It wasn’t not the first time she’d seen it – she’d glimpsed it before – but like the rest of him it seemed so changed. No longer the slender shaft of a youth, but a man’s phallus, swollen and dark and angry, and much, _much_ larger than she was expecting it to be.

A deliciously hot wave of fear surged up inside her, along with a flush of dark heat at her groin, and her fingers curled lightly around its base. She marvelled at the way it responded to her touch, and Thomas groaned at the sight of her slender fingers against the shaft. The skin there was like silk, thinly padded and velvety-soft over a shaft of steel. She slid the tips of her fingers up its length, drawing the collar of skin up about the head, and back again.

Thomas clenched his hands, seemed undecided about what to do with them, then buried them in her hair, winding through his fingers. She leaned forward, the musky scent filling her world as she brought her lips to the head, and slowly, tentatively, tongued at it. It tasted briny.

Her head was filled with a thousand and one images from her mother’s books, but not one of them, nor her dreams of ghosts, could have prepared her for the way it felt in her mouth, soft as brushed silk, or the tension in Thomas’s body and how he seemed caught between the twin urges to bury himself deeper and to tear himself away. His hands tightened in her hair, hard enough to hurt, as she explored, rolling her tongue around it, letting it slip from her mouth and bump lightly against her parted lips, seeking entrance. She took him back in, a little harder, a little deeper.

His hands fisted in her hair. She wrapped her hand around the base, and it felt warm and heavy and right in her grip, and he thrust his hips with a groan. It hit the back of her tongue, making her gag, and she recoiled, turning her head away to catch her breath, the taste of him lingering on her tongue. Thomas was breathing hard, his eyes glazed as he stared down at her, then he lifted his gaze towards the portrait.

_I feel as though she’s watching us._

His expression was unreadable, his mouth a hard angry line. For a moment, looking up at him, she felt a glimmer of fear at what they were doing, what they might have set in motion, but then she thought of her mother’s rictus grin beneath a ruin of blood and bone. She murmured his name.

His gaze snapped back down towards her. He looked more drunk than ever, intoxicated with desire and dark-edged shame, and then he leaned forward and kissed her hard enough to bruise her lips. He hadn’t shaved since that morning and his stubble scratched at the tender skin of her jaw. She bit down on his lower lip and sucked his lip into her mouth, tasting blood.

He froze.

Then he ripped at the dressing gown and the nightgown underneath. She matched him, violence for violence, as he hauled up her nightgown, gripped her thighs and pulled her forward, to the edge of the stool. He pressed his fingers at her entrance, and a whispering traitorous voice at the edge of her thoughts whispered: _He has done this before._ A black spike of jealousy pierced her heart, until the moment his fingers hooked inside her and her envy was almost, but not quite, forgotten. He kept his gaze fixed on hers, and there was an urgency about him as he plunged his fingers inside her up to the knuckle, first one finger, then two, twisting in slow tormenting circles. And still it wasn’t enough.

She rolled her hips towards him, and in response he moved his thumb and the sudden direct contact with her clitoris was so shocking it was almost painful. She gave a ragged cry, and he swore softly, pressing his hand over her mouth. It was warm, damp with sweat.

“The _servants_ , Lucille.”

She jerked her head out from under his hand, gasping as his fingers hit a spot inside her that seemed to connect with the front of her cleft. Her stiffened nipples brushed against the cotton of the nightgown, “They’ll think it Mother’s ghost,” she said, grinding down towards him, seeking a deeper penetration. The moments of her hips seemed involuntary, her body being carried away by something more powerful than them both. “And what does it matter? We’ll let them all go, and hire new servants.” She remembered his shaft, and grasped for it with clumsy fingers.

“To work in a–” He groaned, dropping his head back. “–A house with a ghost? No one will want that position.”

“We don’t need them,” she said, breathless. “We don’t need anyone but each other.”

The head of his shaft was slippery with fluid and she closed her fingers around it, dampening her hand, slicking it over and around him. Thomas gasped, stabbing his fingers deep inside her, then they slipped suddenly away. Before she could protest, his eyes met hers, tormented with desire, shame and guilt, and ripe with the question: _Are you certain?_

Her reply was to open her legs and wriggle to the edge of the stool. His gaze dropped down to the dark cleft between her legs, and he swallowed. Her legs hooked around his, pulling him closer, and he wasn’t asking any more. It was too late, because the head of his shaft was pressing against her entrance, and she was wet and slick and ready for him. Thomas groaned as he slid inside her.

He went still, resting one knee on the piano stool beside her as he took a moment to prepare himself and adjust his position, and then he was thrusting, hard and urgent, clawing at her backside, his trousers rough against her naked thighs, his mouth on her bruised lips, his tongue inside her mouth, claiming her. He slipped his hand beneath her backside to grip the backs of her thighs and spread her legs wider so he could drive himself harder inside her, and it was nothing like his fingers – the shaft inside her was hot and hard, and it responded to her movements, driving her unrelentingly towards her peak.

Thomas gave up attempting to bare her breasts and instead suckled at them through the cotton, soaking the fabric with his saliva. Her pleasure was mounting, rising like a tide with each thrust, with the sensation of the base of his shaft grinding against the front of her cleft, with the wet cotton clinging to her breasts, burning hot and icy cold all at once.

When she came, her hips rose off the stool, and for a moment she was suspended by nothing but his shaft inside her and his grip on her waist. The back of her head slammed into the piano keys, and they rang out, the music as discordant as her ragged cry of pleasure. She wrapped her legs around his back as his movements sped up, until he was hammering into her, all pretence of gentleness gone.

In the instant before he came, he went still, the tendons in his neck bunched and taut, then he jolted, spilling his seed with a groan. He dropped down on top of her, pressing his forehead into the hollow of her throat.

There was a moment when she feared he’d shudder and turn away from her in horror and disgust. Instead he kissed her neck, scraped his teeth against her skin, before he eased out of her. He cast a darting uncertain glance at her as she rearranged her night clothes, but he didn’t seem quite so shaky. He was already composing himself. After all, what was this but the act of two people seeking comfort in one another? It wasn’t as if they were hurting anyone.

This was what they were, and it was nothing more than what their mother had made them. And speaking of their mother...

She could still feel Beatrice Sharpe’s presence, but Lucille no longer felt afraid, not of ghosts or of memories. A curious sort of exorcism, but she had to admit it worked. She stared up at her mother’s portrait, the faintest smile casting a shadow in the corners of her mouth.

 _See what you have created, Mother,_ she thought. _How very proud you must be._

“I wonder whether she did learn anything after all,” Thomas said, his voice shaky as he followed her gaze. Easier to do that, Lucille supposed, than look directly at the sister he’d just despoiled. Thomas always had been good at ignoring the things that made him uncomfortable. “And what on earth it could be.”

 _Why, something of love, of course_ , Lucille thought, but did not say. **  
**


End file.
